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Exporting Racism to Canada

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Earlier, we described the antics of Glenn Singleton, the San Francisco "diversity" trainer who is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote racial stereotyping and scapegoating in the schools, under the guise of remedying the so-called "minority achievement gap." He claims that "white talk" is "verbal, impersonal, intellectual" and "task-oriented," while minority talk is "emotional." He also blames white teachers for the minority achievement gap, saying that racism is "ubiquitous" among whites, even though the gap is equally present in classes taught by minority teachers, and even though Asians, who are non-white, have higher average grades than whites in many school systems. And he claims that Mark Twain was a racist, even though Twain fought racism in an era when racism was sadly popular.
But so deep is the politically correct rot in the schools that Singleton has been hired not only by U.S. school systems and colleges, but also by a misguided school board in Nova Scotia, Canada (the Annapolis Valley Regional School Board).
This is deeply ironic. Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms doesn't have strong protection for free speech akin to the First Amendment, so racist speech in public is banned in Canada under its so-called "human-rights" codes. Any white school teacher who said the offensive things that Singleton says about minorities -- that their speech is not "intellectual," "verbal," or "task-oriented" -- would be subject to prosecution by a human-rights tribunal. The same might even be true for a minority teacher. Yet Singleton gets paid big money -- "a six figure fee" -- to promote these offensive, racist stereotypes.
Even in the United States, where racist speech is protected by the First Amendment, school districts, which are organs of the state, do not have a private citizen's First Amendment right to promote racist propaganda, as Chief Judge Posner observed in Creek v. Village of Westhaven (1996). That's because the First Amendment protects citizens against the government, not the government against its citizens. Indeed, a humiliating, government-sponsored "diversity" training seminar aimed at a captive audience can in some cases give rise to a racial or sexual harassment claim.
Yet, not only has Singleton been hired by gullible school administrators in the United States, like the Arlington, Virginia, schools, he is now being imported by other countries -- even though his racism is the intellectual equivalent of toxic waste.
The gullibility of some school officials seems to know no bounds. After Singleton was hired by the Seattle Schools in 2002, they adopted wacky definitions of racism consistent with his obsession with "white privilege" and promoting racial stereotyping. They defined "individualism" as a form of "cultural racism" (Singleton equates "individualism" with whiteness), claimed that planning ahead is a white characteristic that it is racist to expect minorities to exhibit, and claimed that only whites can be racist (consistent with Singleton's concept of "white privilege"). These definitions later cause the Seattle Schools great embarrassment, when they were mocked by Supreme Court justices in a landmark civil-rights case.
This year, they labeled Thanksgiving as racially insensitive, and called it a "time of mourning" and a "reminder of 500 years of betrayal" of Native Americans.
Singleton recently embarrassed California Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell. This year, he was hired by the gullible O'Connell to give diversity training. O'Connell then was publicly ridiculed after he repeated an offensive stereotype voiced by Glenn Singleton: that blacks, as a people, are loud, and need to have their loudness accommodated in the schools. (In fact, many minority students express dismay about how loud and disorderly their classes are, finding that to be a major impediment to learning. They want "simple, elusive quiet" so they can study). The head of San Francisco's NAACP has demanded an apology from O'Connell for spreading this unfounded racial stereotype.